Parshat Vaetchanan: The merits of performance

Tisha B’Av is a date on the calendar most noted by observant Jews. Differently affiliated Jews generally confine their annual Jewish fasting to Yom Kippur. The concept of sadness or a connection to the darker side of our people’s history is by no means exclusive to any group. History’s enemies of the Jewish people (some of whom continue to make history now) never differentiated between how people practiced their Judaism, as much as they obsessed over the fact that Jews identified as Jews.

The question is: how much longer will those who don’t know of Tisha B’Av identify as Jews?

The last verse in Devarim chapter 6 states: “It will be a merit for us if we are careful to perform this entire commandment before the Lord our G-d, as He commanded us.”

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch spells out his understanding of this verse in simple language. “We can discharge the tasks of our life’s mission only if we keep the whole Torah as ‘mitzvah;’ only if we observe all the laws, without differentiation, as G-d’s commandment, our Divinely-ordained assignment to our life’s station; only if we do every mitzvah carefully, without diminishing from it or changing it, all in accordance with the content and manner prescribed by G-d. We do not have the right to abrogate or reform any of it.”

In Hirsch’s view, there is no question that an observance of Judaism that follows the letter of the Law, as described in Devarim and elsewhere in the Torah, is meritorious for the Jewish people. Obedience to divine dictates, as it were, is a lifestyle that is timeless and is not meant to ever be viewed as being outdated.

When Rabbi JH Hertz assumed the post of Chief Rabbi of England in 1913, his inaugural sermon invoked the message of the Men of the Great Assembly as recorded in the first mishnah in Avot, focusing on their three-tiered message which concludes with “make a fence for the Torah.”

His words are as relevant today as they were then.